Posts Tagged dvd

Watching TV and movies on the big screen usually requires a TV and a big screen, neither of which is particularly portable. But thanks to the jaw-droppingly impressive Boombox Freeview DVD Projector you can do both without strapping a telly to your back.

The clue’s in the name because despite looking like Darth Vader’s boombox crossed with a pair of Bono’s most ludicrous shades, this all-in-one cinema/entertainment system projects DVDs and Freeview TV onto any flat surface you fancy.

Simply plop in your discs, flip open the pivoting, swivelling LED-powered projector and gawp in awe as a quality image up to 75” is flung against the wall. But what’s with all this Freeview business? Well, thanks to a built in DVB-T tuner the Boombox will also spew out any Freeview channel you fancy. Anyone for a bit of big screen World Cup action? Back of the net!

General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.

The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.

But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

The promising work by the G.E. researchers is in the field of holographic storage. Holography is an optical process that stores not only three-dimensional images like the ones placed on many credit cards for security purposes, but the 1’s and 0’s of digital data as well.

The data is encoded in light patterns that are stored in light-sensitive material. The holograms act like microscopic mirrors that refract light patterns when a laser shines on them, and so each hologram’s recorded data can then be retrieved and deciphered.

Holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology, used in DVDs and the newer, high-capacity Blu-ray discs, in which information is stored as a pattern of marks across the surface of a disc. The potential of holographic technology has long been known. The first research papers were published in the early 1960s.

Many advances have been made over the years in the materials science, optics and applied physics needed to make holographic storage a practical, cost-effective technology. And this year, InPhase Technologies, a spinoff of Bell Labs of Alcatel-Lucent, plans to introduce a holographic storage system, using $18,000 machines and expensive discs, for specialized markets like video production and storing medical images.

To date, holographic storage has not been on a path to mainstream use. The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts. The G.E. researchers have used a different approach than past efforts. It relies on smaller, less complex holograms — a technique called microholographic storage.

A crucial challenge for the team, which has been working on this project since 2003, has been to find the materials and techniques so that smaller holograms reflect enough light for their data patterns to be detected and retrieved.

The recent breakthrough by the team, working at the G.E. lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., north of Albany, was a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of their holograms, putting them at the bottom range of light reflections readable by current Blu-ray machines.

The DVD Coach Single Target Duplicator is the world’s first Ultra Slim Portable DVD/CD Duplicator. Its compact innovative design represents an important advancement in the DVD/CD duplication industry. Unlike other types of systems, the Slim DVDup is easy to use and versatile. The DVD Coach functions as a stand-alone DVD/CD duplicator and can be plugged into a computer to function as two external drives. Beginners and advanced users will find the DVD Coach a perfect portable solution.